Villar backs call for amendment of Oil Deregulation Law
Senate President Manuel Villar said he will back amendments to Republic Act 8479 or the Oil Deregulation Law to prevent giant oil companies from fixing oil prices.
"We have a cartel and the Oil Deregulation Law lacks an anti-trust provision," Villar told reporters here on Sunday before he opened the Iwag Festival in Pototan town in Iloilo.
A trust exists when commercial companies have a monopolistic or semi-monopolistic control over the production of some commodity or service.
Villar said the law is "being abused by major players of the oil industry" which dictates the prices of oil products.
Transport groups held a nationally coordinated strike last week paralyzing public transportation in some provinces and cities of the country to protest the continued increase of prices of oil products. One of the demands of transport groups was the repeal of the Oil Deregulation Law.
Citing a recent United Nations report, the independent think-tank Ibon Foundation said the Philippines is among the countries that are most vulnerable to oil price shocks because it is heavily dependent on imported oil.
It noted that more than 90 percent of the local oil industry remains in the control of giant transnational corporations (TNCs) through their local units Petron, Shell, Caltex, and Total.
It said the Oil Deregulation Law has further strengthened the monopoly of these companies because automatic oil price hikes are allowed.
"Consequently, oil companies took advantage of the policy, hiking pump prices of all petroleum products by around 535 percent since the Oil Deregulation Law was first implemented in April 1996," it said in a statement.
It said that since 2000, pump prices have been "overpriced by as much as P4.55 per liter as oil price hikes were left unregulated."
Militant legislators of the party-list groups Anakpawis, Bayan Muna and Gabriela Women’s Party on November 6 have filed three bills to regulate oil price increases in the country
These are: House Bill 3029 (An Act Regulating the Downstream Petroleum Industry and for Other Related Purposes), House Bill 3030 (An Act Instituting Centralized Procurement of Petroleum in the Country) and House Bill 3031 (An Act Renationalizing Petron Corporation).
The lawmakers said in a joint statement that HB 3029 will repeal the Oil Deregulation Law while HBs 3030 and 3031 will mandate the government to have a centralized procurement of oil products from the cheapest sources available in the world and the re-acquisition of a majority government stake in Petron.